What Are ‘Chinese Police’ Doing in The U.S.?

WASHINGTON, DC, Dec 14 — The Communist Chinese regime denies opening “police stations” in countries around the world including the United States; they are not police stations, they are offices that aid Communist Chinese citizens with mundane services, say the powers that be in Beijing. But an illicit, foreign police station by any other name is still a police station and has no right to operate in American cities.

FBI Director Christopher Wray told the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee last month, “I have to be careful about discussing our specific investigative work, but to me it is outrageous to think that the Chinese police would attempt to set up shop—you know, in New York let’s say…It violates sovereignty and circumvents standard judicial and law enforcement cooperation processes.” 

The Chinese call their offshore offices 110 Overseas Police Service Centers, 110 being their national emergency police phone number, their version of 911 in the U.S. Yet, they insist they are not police stations. According to China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs its 110 offices are there to offer aid to Chinese expatriates, says CNN.

Beijing has denied it has been sending undeclared police forces to track down enemies of the state. Its Ministry of Foreign Affairs told CNN in November: “We hope that relevant parties stop hyping it up to create tensions. Using this as a pretext to smear China is unacceptable.” Instead, China has claimed the facilities are administrative hubs, set up to help Chinese expatriates with tasks like renewing their driver’s licenses. China has also said the offices were a response to the COVID-19 pandemic, “which had left many citizens locked down in other countries and locked out of China, unable to renew documentation.”

The international rights group that calls itself, Safeguard Defenders, reports that the Chinese are lying, pointing out that they operate out of more than 100 so-called police stations in more than 50 nations around the world. The organization says that there are unauthorized Chinese police stations in New York and Los Angeles. 

The Defenders say they have tracked dozens of cases of so-called “persuasion to return” incidents in which Chinese police captured and illegally “persuaded” ex-pat Chinese citizens to return to their homeland. The Epoch Times reports that some European nations are cooperating with the Beijing police, including Italy, Croatia, Serbia, and Romania. Other countries, Ireland and the Netherlands, for example, shut down these illicit police stations. When Canadian authorities discovered that Chinese cops were operating in their country they filed official complaints with the Chinese embassy in Ottawa.

When the U.S. balked at the presence and activities of Chinese cops in America, the Chinese Embassy denied wrong doing. The Reuters news agency followed up and asked the Embassy to explain what their police officers were doing in the U.S., Liu Pengyu, the Embassy’s spokesman responded: “They assist overseas Chinese nationals who need help in accessing the online service platform to get their driving licenses renewed and receive physical check-ups for that purpose…They are not police personnel from China. The U.S. side should stop the groundless hyping of this issue.”

However, the Voice of America, reckons that over the past 12 months more than 230,000 Chinese nationals residing in other countries were returned to their homeland “to face criminal proceedings.” The co-author of the Safeguard Defenders report, Laura Harth, told the VOA that the Chinese outreach not only targets their citizens abroad, it’s not only overseas Chinese dissidents who are targets. She says Beijing is also targeting “critics of the regime, religious and ethnic minorities anywhere in the world…The Chinese regime is becoming increasingly brazen in pursuing these illegal means across the globe and not even hiding it very well.”